1972 Chevy El Camino 350 Engine Rebuild - El Cheapo

Hey, look-we turned a $400 nonrunning pile into a $1,256.49 daily drivable pile! Why? Because that's what gearheads do.It all started when a loser buddy was moving out of town and pretty much forced us to overpay $400 for his clapped-out '72 El Camino. The floorpans were really rusty (three holes the size of your head), and the 350 hadn't run in 12 years. Most of the parts that had been removed from the car were stacked in the bed, but the transmission was gone. Overlooking that, we dug the fact that it had no air conditioning, no power steering, and no power brakes-our kind of strippo hot rod! Naturally, we had to have it.

But then we didn't know what to do with it. We eventually decided to just get it running so we could move it around, but it started to grow on us, sort of like the mold on the seat. We threw some swap meet-speed goodies on it, and now it smokes the bias-plies so brutally that we may even have the incentive to keep building it, slowly adding nicer stuff as we can afford it. After all, Car Craft's Cheap Street '70 Chevelle started this way nearly five years ago, and look at it now! Check out how we threw this thing together in five days, and let us know if you want more.

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Things We Would Have Done Differently

We paid too much for the trans and converter. Junkyard units might have been $50 total, and the risk isn't that much greater than with a swap meet unit. A stock converter would work better with the yukky 2.56 rear gears, but the one we have will be great if we swap to 3.73s.

There wasn't a really good reason to swap the intake manifold for an initial just-get-it-running effort.

Nearly anyone will tell you that our 800-cfm carb is totally wrong for this application, but you sure can't tell it by driving the car. Besides, we totally ripped off some guy when we paid only $50 for the sucker.

The cam duration seems a bit too much for this engine, which has 8.5:1 compression at best. A duration of 214 at 0.050 may have been a wiser choice. Even with the 224-at-0.050 cam, it sucks 15 inches at idle.

We're terrifically lame for (once again) not printing quarter-mile numbers for the Elco. It just plain didn't get done in time. Don't try and tell us that's never happened to you.